Evaluating Ticket Price and Attendance For Cleveland Browns vs NFL Averages
2022-04-12
To Mike Mossholder,
Chief Marketing Officer, Cleveland Browns
Introduction
Despite, by most measures, a poor onfield performance by our product, we have successfully navigated a zero win season and a pandemic without sacrificing ticket sale volume. We sold out every home game in 2021, our average attendance was 67,431 (72,000 capacity), and the average ticket price rose to $100.52, though still below the league average. Our loyal fanbase presents us with an opportunity to increase revenue through ticket sales without losing attendance.
After the unexpected turbulence of COVID, we’ve seen a renewed demand for live football and an increased willingness to pay for it as reflected by an increase in league-wide attendance and ticket prices following the 2020 season. We should increase ticket prices and allocate marketing budget to promote our ticket packages through social media to a targeted segment willing to absorb the pricing increase.
1. Do higher ticket prices negatively impact attendance?
Figure 1 shows the relationship between ticket price and home attendance for the Browns (in orange) relative to the rest of the league from 2008 to 2021. Notice first that our ticket prices have remained lower than most of the other teams in the league, even as the entire NFL raised ticket prices following COVID. Most importantly, with the exception of 2015-2016, when Browns’ ticket prices increased, we did not see a drop in attendance. This holds true for most other teams as well, indicating that demand is rather inelastic. This leads us to recommend increasing ticket prices.
2. How does Browns attendance compare to total NFL attendance?
Figure 2 shows the Browns average home attendance as a proportion of the average total NFL attendance between 2008-2021. Our attendance has been consistently lower than the league average, even as ticket sales remain high. This may be in part to poor performance in recent years, but we should allocate adequate resources to ensure we are not only selling tickets, but driving fans to actually show up for the game.
Hovering over different years will show NFL total average attendance (blue) and portion belonging to The Browns average attendance (orange).
3. How does the NFL average ticket price compare to average ticket price for The Browns?
In an effort to reinforce the idea that we are not marketing our tickets at a high enough price, note Figure 3 below. We see that our average ticket price has remained below the league average since 2006, representing 15 seasons of lost potential revenue. We have closed the gap in the last two seasons, but even as of 2021, the difference in average ticket price between us and the league was -$6.53. With 72,000 seats, that still represents $470,160 in lost potential revenue per game by not simply meeting league average.
4. Which of our social media channels are growing more rapidly?
Figure 4 below visualizes the changes in followers from our two largest social media channels, Facebook & Twitter, from August 2012-March 2022. As of March 2022, we have nearly 1.5mil Twitter followers, up from ~150k just a decade ago. While our Facebook page grew steadily from 2012-2016, we’ve seen growth slow significantly since, though the growth rate is still positive.
Therefore it is our conclusion that we should capitalize on this growth by increasing our budget for Twitter campaigns to sell tickets and create additional brand awareness. If growth rates for Twitter followers continue as Facebook followers plateau, then Twitter represents our best channel for reaching the highest number of fans. As we consider ticket price increases, we should be aware that Twitter is our social media channel most likely to reach new ticket buyers and the place where we should seek new ticket holders to replace any we may lose due to their sensitivity to price.
